Whew, it's done. TMBF now rates movies on a scale of up to five stars. Here's the new ratings system explained.

I have of course been considering it for some time now, and I've finally decided to do it. Why? Because I couldn't in good conscience give the same rating to films like Legion, Merantau Warrior and Woohoo! Or, for that matter, the same rating to District 9, Transformers 2 and State of Play. (And hey, check 'em out! I've added poster images to all my old reviews, so they don't look so bare anymore.)

You may have noticed that all these were originally three-star films, and that's mostly what I stuck to; I generally refrained from revising the two-and-a-half star reviews, though in a few cases I was tempted. Thing is, I don't really want to spend too much effort on thinking of the exact star rating to give. My thoughts on the movies I watch are in the reviews proper, which I spend quite a bit of time and effort to write, thank you. I'd hate for a reader to just glance at the star rating and make a snap assumption of my opinion.

Which is one reason why I finally gave in and recalibrated my rating scale. Still, I wouldn't want anyone to think that any two movies with the same rating are exactly alike. A film is a very complex machine, made of countless parts all adding up to a whole greater than their sum. Your friends and acquaintances might give you their opinion of a movie as "nice" or "not nice", but my aim is to be more informative than that. 'Cos that's how TMBF rolls.